Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

No plays on Monday. My mom was pretty bagged from the long day on Sunday, so we left her in the cottage and drove east of town a few miles to a little hike we like here called the Grizzly Peak Trail.
Click any photo to enlarge

It was a Butterfly Barrio up there, they were all over the place. Here are two pair at different stages in their - um - courtship:

Further up the path, a fairly nonchalant deerlet was grazing away, and every now and then casting glances at us:

As the sign mentioned, there was a fire up there in 2002, and it makes for some eerie landscape to hike through:

I was startled to look down at the trail and see a bare footprint - some lady Sasquatch? A forest nymph clothed in something diaphanous woven from fern? They continued for a long way down the trail. We never saw who they belonged to.

Back in town, we took a short walk after dinner with my mom, and happened on this little performance in the town’s band shell.  It’s pretty hilarious. (Youtube video - click the cartoon icon):

Off for another hike, then Gem of the Ocean tonight.

We’ve been making this trip to Ashland annually since 1994, when a group from our son’s school started coming down, and we tagged along as fellow-travelers. Those early trips involved a driving day (it’s 8 hours down I-5 if you’re willing to dine on granola bars and accept catheterization), 3 days of 2 plays each, and another driving day back. After the first year, that itinerary began to seem far too rushed, as we started finding other things we liked to do here, including some incredibly nice hikes, and we started adding days to the trip in order to accommodate them.

We also started flying down instead of driving. I love getting on these Horizon commuter planes, cuz they’re almost always taking me someplace fun here in the Northwest.

The festival runs from February to November in three theatres. Throughout this season, they will produce 11 different plays, although not all run concurrently. We’ve been buying a membership in the Festival for a number of years, and that allows you to participate in a member’s ticket presale in November. Consequently, our seats just rock. We were in the 4th row for the Cherry Orchard yesterday, and that’s the farthest away we’ll be from the stage - the rest are 1st or 2nd row. Here’s the rest of our schedule:

• Gem of the Ocean - August Wilson - Tuesday night
• As You Like It - Wednesday afternoon
• Distracted - Lisa Loomer - Wednesday evening
• The Tempest - Thursday evening
• Taming of the Shrew - Friday evening
• On the Razzle - Tom Stoppard - Saturday evening

I probably need a little more time to seriously reflect on the two we saw yesterday (there are no plays on Mondays here). In The Cherry Orchard, an old life is coming to an end as a family estate that has served as a touchstone for characters from various social and economic strata is falling into receivership and being sold. If you have some background on Chekhov’s life and times, the specific archetypes of his Russian society will reveal themselves; if you don’t, it’s still a gentle, but focused, discourse on impermanence.

Tracy’s Tiger was adapted by several OSF people from a novella of William Saroyan’s. It revolves around a young man who blows his chances with a girl with whom he’s besotted, and spins into dissolution. En route, he encounters various other people who seem to have had one main chance in life followed by decades-long denouement, and he despairs of getting another chance with his squeeze. He is accompanied by a familiar whom he characterizes as a tiger (though he’s played by a human actor), that acts as his muse and scourge. His paramour also has a familiar, and the romantic byplay between the two familiars seems to have more spark and sexual potential than the 3-dimensional characters’.

Anyway, it’s presented as a musical, which is problematic to me, as I’ve said before. Some things fold neatly into musical rendition, and others seem tediously belabored, as when a 5-minute song delivers a sentence of plot. I probably need to see more musicals. I did enjoy this production, though. For one thing, it was a revelation to see actors whom I’ve watched for years in spoken roles suddenly burst into unlooked-for singing voices.

Another interesting aspect of the Tracy’s Tiger production was that one actor, who had a fairly significant role, could not perform at the last minute, and his understudy had to be located and reeled in. The understudies wear pagers on the days when they may be needed, but they may be immersed in some domestic travail when the call comes. On a backstage tour last year, a long-time actor related how he’d been running a roto-tiller when his pager went off. Last night, the understudy carried notes on the stage (which is expected), but didn’t seem to need them much except, interestingly, when singing.

Because of its length and robust funding, the Festival provides almost a full year’s work for its actors and, although contracts are only proffered for a year at a time, many of them have had long runs, and it’s fascinating to see them morph from one role to another, often on the same day. We also see them wandering around town doing the same stuff that any other small-town resident does in his off-hours: shopping, eating in restaurants, buying pre-performance coffee at Starbuck’s - but for us, with our familiarity with them, it’s so much like seeing rock stars on the street. Yesterday, one of Mrs. Perils’ heart-throb actors was in the check-out line of a grocery store. Mrs. Perils said something to indicate that she thought we were finished shopping. I reminded her that we still needed to buy wine, and was entrusted with that task by myself while she helpfully obtained a place in line.

We pushed our visit back a couple of weeks this year from our usual time so that we could secure a cottage that we really like. It’s only a couple of blocks from the theatres, and it’s nestled down by a lovely, cool creek. That’s my mom standing at the rail, whom we’ve been bringing along with us the past few years:

It’s next door to, and shares a deck with, a pottery/sculpture studio of some kind, and there are finished and in-process works strewn around the walkways.

OK, we’re going off into the woods for a hike. More photos and such later.

It’s taken me 4+ years, but I’ve finally sunk to employing the cat-blogging meme. But I can’t resist posting these photos of our cat Rico ensconced in his summer hideout under the Japanese maple (click to enlarge):

We’re at the airport waiting for our flight to Medford, OR.  We see two plays today - Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and William Saroyan’s Tracy’s Tiger.  More when I alight somewhere in Oregon.

Despite the fact that it’s a holiday week, it’s been pretty harried for me. I believe I’ve mentioned before that we’re headed for Ashland, OR on Sunday for our annual haj to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and, since I took a long weekend last week, I’ve been humping work pretty seriously this week in order to slip out of town.

Something new I started doing this week is using my bike to commute to work. Since I’m a computer consultant running my own business, I often have to flit around town from client to client, and that kind of itinerary does not lend itself well to either using transit or biking. For the last year or so, though, I’ve been doing a lot of work for a client over in Redmond, and the trek over there from my residence here in sorta-urban Seattle requires a trip across Lake Washington on one of the two floating-bridge freeways that connect Seattle to the eastern suburbs.

As the region has grown, these bridges have become nightmarish commuting bottlenecks. Any little glitch during prime commuting hours can consign all of those behind to a hellish commute. I often wonder how traffic backups get started. I continue to presume that I’m a victim of the timid, the unskilled and the just plain stupid.

Anyway, I’ve been driving this commute 3 - 4 times weekly when I’m in town, after years of studiously avoiding it, and I just cringe when I approach a backup in either direction. Yeah, I’ve got an iPod I can plug into the stereo deck, but it’s just such a waste of my prodigious talent to sit in traffic for a couple hours a day.

Then last weekend during our camping trip, I was talking with someone who said he also commuted to the east side, and rode his bike to the bus pickup on the west side of the 520 bridge, put his bike on the bus’s rack and bused the rest of the way to his office. I’ve lived here for nearly 33 years, many of those as an avid cyclist, and never once have I put my bike on a bus. I think that’s because, in the city, I can usually bike faster than most bus routes, with their frequent stops and spotty timeliness. But, with this casual conversation, a light went off in my head, and Tuesday morning found me screaming down the hill on my bike from my house to the western terminus of the 520 bridge.

The first bus that came by was actually the one that I’d set my sights on, but the first reality of bus-biking arose when all three slots on the bike rack were already filled. Someone told me that , since that route also served Microsoft, the bike rack was often full. I was saved moments later when the second reality of bus-biking presented itself - a bus that was out of operation and heading back to its base stopped for three of us bikers who’d been awaiting a lift. Dead-heading buses can blow by passengers, but they have to pick up bikers waiting to cross the bridge.

Anyway, it worked great that first day. Once we debarked on the east side, a nice young woman who was headed for Microsoft guided me through the labyrinthine byways to a bike path that ran to within a half-mile of my workplace. I glided into our parking lot, parked my bike and swaggered into the office feeling like I’d accessed life from a completely new portal. Bike commuting significantly lowers the bar for the concept of “business casual”, but my perspiration and hyperventilating seemed to engender more admiration than disdain (it’s an outdoor equipment manufacturer, after all).

I did the same commute on Thursday and Friday. The interesting thing about Friday was that the Sound Transit bus that picked me up was equipped with experimental WiFi capability. It’s only offered, interestingly, on the route that drops you off on the Microsoft campus. As I boarded and looked for a seat, a good number of folks had their laptops, Blackberrys and whatever else out and were diligently keyboarding.

I popped my laptop out of my backpack and booted it, hoping to send an exciting blog-post from the bus, but my ride was only about 10 minutes long, and, although I was able to obtain a connection and an IP address, I couldn’t coax it to let browse the internet, so I shut it down and awaited my stop at the Microsoft campus.

I had a vicarious thrill getting off at Microsoft, with the “It’s a Small World After All” crowd that you find there, and at so many meritocratic high-tech venues, but my failure to gen up an internet connection on the bus is probably a metaphor for why they strolled on to their cubicles, gourmet cafeterias and stock options, while I strapped my helmet on and rode off to the lower echelons of Redmond.

We had a fine long weekend on San Juan Island. It didn’t start out looking very promising, as it began raining just as our ferry left the dock at Anacortes:
Click any photo to engorge

We had a brief respite upon landing in Friday Harbor on San Juan Island, and we dawdled around, ate lunch, shopped for groceries and headed for the campground. We got our tent set up and walked over to some friends’ campsite just as the sky opened up with a hellish downpour. Fortunately, these friends had just set up a large awning tarp, and we sat glumly while a seemingly impenetrable wall of water imprisoned us there for the better part of an hour.

And then, it was over, for pretty much the whole weekend, and we enjoyed a very pretty evening, as the sun peeked out in time for a misty sunset.

I was startled to see this FedEx truck pull into the campground (that’s our blue tent in the background). I hadn’t been expecting a package. I knew they were good, but it was rather beyond the call to track me down on an island campsite. Actually, the driver just pulled in to use the rest room.

There were something like 20 adults and 16 kids in our loosely-affiliated group. The connections between us were a combination of kayaking, and a Seattle elementary school where most of the parents had met each other. The kids were well-behaved and their parents were very attentive, and they formed their little coalitions as kids will. The log below was a sort of impromptu playhouse. Kids would tell their parents that they were going off to play with so-and-so, and the response was often, “You can go to The Log, but not to the beach unless you’re with an adult. An adult you know.” There are actually three distinct kid ecosystems in the log picture below left: the upper left group just jumping off, the group underneath, and a slightly older group upper right. It was a really versatile facility.

I love the picture on the lower right, all the guys yukkin’ it up and roughhousing (I think the girls are preparing for a post-prandial talent show). They’re waiting for marshmallows, chocolate and graham crackers to make their appearance.

The sunset Saturday night was pretty spectacular.

On Sunday, the weather improved such that we could see the Olympic Mountains. Mrs. Perils and I got out for a sweet little voyage before we broke camp and headed for the ferry.

On the ferry ride back to Anacortes, Mt. Baker was visible from time to time as we weaved between islands.

Our son left with some friends Tuesday for a few days of play-going and (I presume) revelry in Ashland, Oregon. We’ll be heading down there a week from Sunday, with my mom in tow. She’s flying to Seattle from Detroit on July 4th. Hope the Northwest pilots are in a holiday flying mood that day. I felt a real pang when he left - I want to go to Ashland NOW.

We’re taking a long weekend off ourselves, leaving today for a 4-day camping/kayaking trip to San Juan Island. I’ve spent the short week since arriving home from Milwaukee Friday night running around to clients, battening hatches and hatching battens, or whatever.  As we did last year, we’ll be sharing campsites with some younger families, with children from pre-school to grade school. Also, it looks like rain. It’ll either be rejuvenating, or it’ll kill us.

So, probably no internet until Sunday night, unless we hit the eject button and check into some cushy resorty lodgings. Credit card’s cocked, safety’s off.

I cruised home from Milwaukee on my usual 11 pm arrival Friday night. On the plane home I read a fair amount of an issue of The New York Review of Books. We subscribe, and the thing sits around the house for a month, but plane rides seem to be the only time I sit my ADD ass in one place long enough to read it. Helps that I have to have my laptop off for portions of the ride.I always learn something when I do page through it. For instance, this issue had:

• a review of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia plays currently on Broadway. We’ve enjoyed his Arcadia, Rough Crossing, and Travesties, and we’ll see another (On The Razzle) in Ashland (in less than 2 weeks!!!). The Utopia series is 3 plays about mid-19th century Russian intellectuals - all performed in one day, apparently. I would trust his depth of research and spell-binding command of language to make it worthwhile. A friend of mine saw the cycle in New York and enjoyed it.
• David Lodge (author of The Art of Fiction) reviews a biography of Kingsley Amis, and I learned a bit of lore about the pre-post-modernists.
• A review of a book about the Indian Mughal dynasty and how its devil’s bargain with the East India Company helped morph it from a regime tolerant of many religions and sects into a hapless participant in the bloody Indian Mutiny. This is the second piece I’ve read this year that spoke of two phases of the British adventure in India - a comparatively benign first phase wherein East India operatives were symbiotic with the Indian culture and often assimilated, and a repressive second phase characterized by evangelical Christian missionaries. I’m interested enough to read some actual books about it.
• Reviews of a re-release of Casanova’s autobiography, titled, with characteristic humbleness, History of My Life. The memoir comes in two flavors - a 6-volume, 4,300-page set and an abridged 1,400-page edition. Always a one-word caricature to me, he turns out to be a pretty interesting figure. It seems like he was everywhere at once - Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Britain. He hob-nobbed with the age’s great philosophers and politicians, and apparently only (!) a third of the 4,000 pages is about his sexual adventures. It seems he actually wrote quite a bit (there is an allusion to a trunk full of life-long note-taking that he mined for the memoir), and his prose seems entertaining and droll. Here, he wanders into an Amsterdam nightclub:

It was a musicau - a dark orgy in a place which was a veritable sewer of vice, a disgrace to even the most repellent debauchery. The very sound of the two or three instruments which made up the orchestra plunged the soul in sadness. A room reeking with the smoke of bad tobacco, with the stench of garlic which came from the belches emitted by the men who were dancing or sitting with a bottle or a pot of beer to their right and a hideous slattern to their left…

I find myself admiring his sheer exuberance for living, and I might be tempted to try reading his account of it.

This seems to be the essence of my blog experience the last few days.  It’s not Novell’s fault - but I’m puzzled by the celebration of a time-out error:

If you’ve had problems connecting to this site in the last month or so, I apologize. My web hosting company, powweb.com, has somehow screwed up a service that I was really pleased with for the first year I used them. They’re apparently having trouble with their MySQL servers, where this blog resides, and the performance is all over the place, from instantaneous to non-existent. I chose them because they allow 20 gb of storage in their basic package, and I have a bunch of photos and video. Other hosts offer lots of bandwidth but not so much storage. Until you guys get your friends and relatives to obsess over reading me, bandwidth will never be a constraint here.

I’m going to give them another week or two, and then I’m going to move the domain somewhere else. Whatever I do, it should be pretty transparent to you. If you’ve got the time, though, I’d like to hear when you have problems getting here. I guess this is a little taste of what will happen if the telecoms are allowed to dismantle net neutrality.

Sorry for the hassle.

Editor’s Note:  I just upgraded my Wordpress to version 2.2.  I’ll have to rebuild my blogroll and banner pics, etc, but (wishful thinking?) it seems to be a little more responsive.

Since today, Father’s Day, is a travel day (yep, Milwaukee again), my son and I went hiking yesterday on Rattlesnake Ridge, just outside North Bend, WA. The cool thing is, I think he actually wanted to do it. After a childhood of resolutely inveighing against it, he now really likes hiking, and the more challenging, the better.

A challenge to his 25-year-old self, however, can easily become a death march for 57-year-old me, especially when Mrs. Perils isn’t along to use as a foil (”slow down a bit, son, your mother’s getting winded.” (this fools no one about who’s actually getting winded)). He was very courteous, though, as I could tell he was holding back when we came to an especially steep ascent.

Here we are at our lunch stop, a prow of rock that afforded a commanding 270-degree view of the Snoqualmie River valley (Click any photo to enlarge):

Here’s the view east, with the Cedar River reservoir peeking out in the center:

And here’s the view west, towards Issaquah and Seattle. In the center is Mt. Si, which provided the backdrop for the opening credits on the TV show Twin Peaks, although this view is from the opposite side.

Mrs. Perils and I had given ourselves some aluminum trekking poles for Christmas, but I hadn’t used them until yesterday. Well, I carried them, but ended up not using them at all during the ascent because they would have interfered with my ability to keep up, and also because I really didn’t feel a need for them. Their purpose is to reduce the amount of wear on knees and hips, especially when carrying backpacks, and I had brought them because (click for secret subscriber-only message) and I was anticipating some hip pain from it. Luckily, nothing really hurt while I was hiking. I used the poles sporadically on our descent, trying to figure out a technique for their employ. Most of the time, I just carried them, though, as the boy managed to make the downhike an anaerobic experience as well.

It was a great day for a hike, despite the overcast. Except for a short period when we were high enough to be in the cloud layer, the rain held off nicely until we got down to the parking lot. Then, over a distance of about 200 yards, we were thoroughly drenched, making for wet-dog syndrome on the drive home.

Happy Father’s Day to all of you who are fathers, and all of you who have fathers!